Three lives

As I have grown older, I notice that I am reading more biographies.  I do not wholly understand why this is so.  In some recent cases, for example a biography of Goethe, it is because I am now more familiar with his prodigious literary output and his influence on his contemporaries than when I was younger, and therefore am now better able to understand his importance.  In other cases, for example a biography of Charles V, it is because the years when he was the Habsburg emperor encompassed several historical events about which I already knew a little and with which he was centrally involved – the German Reformation, Henry of England’s divorce, the Spanish invasion of Central America, the growth of Turkish power in the Eastern Mediterranean.  In the case of Goethe, reading about the life helps make sense of the work, in the case of Charles, knowing about the combination of momentous events helps make sense of his life. 

There is perhaps another reason, which has to do with the widespread human predisposition to tell stories as a means of explanation.  I am a little suspicious of arguments based primarily on narrative examples, as if hard facts were not relevant to the process of persuasion.  Contrariwise, I recognise the value of stories in bringing the facts, once established, to life.  The plural of anecdote is not data, but evidence in aggregate does not move us in the same was as narrated particularities do.  To understand the world in the fullest sense we need numbers and words, graphs and pictures, and data and stories.  Biographies are ideal vehicles for story telling because they are framed around the familiar human pattern of birth, life, and death.  As I have become older, the importance of this frame has become more intelligible, hence biographies more interesting.

I met Lydia Moland last year, at a conference in Berlin, where we had a brief but interesting conversation about Hegel’s philosophy of history.  She told me she had just finished writing a biography of Lydia Maria Child, about whom I knew nothing.  She reassured me that I was not alone in my ignorance, but that Child’s life was worth knowing about, so when her book was published last autumn I bought a copy and read it.  Lydia M was right about Lydia M C: her life is interesting and inspiring, a brave and tenacious woman who contributed significantly to the anti-slavery movement in the United States in the mid nineteenth century.  She sacrificed her early popularity as a writer of fiction and children’s books – itself a significant achievement for a young woman at that time – to become a leading advocate for abolitionism.  She wrote books, pamphlets, and letters, and was for a while the editor of The National Anti-Slavery Standard, the New York based abolitionist newspaper.  She was a lifelong campaigner, who refused to give up working for the causes she believed in, no matter how bleak the national political situation appeared, no matter how unsatisfactory her own personal life, no matter how little money or security she had to fall back on. 

I liked this biography a great deal.  I knew a little of the political history of America in the period before the civil war, having previously read work on this topic by Sean Wilentz and Jill Lepore, but Lydia’s book animated the politics of the period through the story of Child’s life. It is an engaging read, with a rewarding blend of scholarship – both the political history and the wide range of issues Child wrote about – mixed with the author’s evident enthusiasm for Child’s enduring relevance as an inspirational activist.  Her unwillingness to give ground to those who either ignored or excused injustice was admirable, but is also challenging to contemporary readers, since many of the issues she campaigned on remain unresolved in our own time.   

I think Frank Ramsey would have liked Lydia Maria Child had they ever met.  Ramsay was born one hundred and one years after her, in a different country and class, and into a different economic and political world.  In the 1920s, he mixed with the Bloomsbury Circle in London and the brightest philosophers and economists of the day in Cambridge.  He was a mathematical prodigy, a brilliant young philosopher and economist, whose writings became and remain influential across a range of academic disciplines, and whose disputations with, among others, Keynes, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Sraffa, have become legendary.  He was sympathetic to socialism and feminism, was a convinced atheist (although his younger brother ended up as Archbishop of Canterbury), and he went to Vienna to undertake psychoanalysis with one of Freud’s pupils.  Ramsay achieved a great deal, but unlike Child, who lived until she was almost eighty, he was dead before his twenty-seventh birthday.  

Writing a biography of someone who died so young would normally present a significant challenge, but in Ramsay’s case he had already achieved more intellectually than most of us will do were we to live to one hundred and twenty-seven.  Additionally, he was friendly with many others who were or became famous and whose work and lives are well documented.  There is therefore no shortage of interesting material, and Cheryl Misak makes good use of it in her recently published biography.  Some philosophers have argued that “the life” has no real bearing on “the thought”, for example, Stuart Hampshire, in his book on Spinoza, writes: Knowledge of the personality and circumstances of a philosopher is in general strictly irrelevant to the understanding and evaluation of his arguments.  I did not find that sentence plausible when I first read it as an undergraduate, and I remain unconvinced, whether in the case of Spinoza, Ramsey, or anyone else.  I enjoyed Misak’s book not just owing to the intellectual brilliance of her subject, nor the tragedy of his early death, but precisely because she demonstrates the connection between thought and life, between the story and the storyteller.

The third of my trilogy of recently read biographies is rather different from the first two.  It is not the product of a major academic publishing house, but a small independent publisher in London called Holland Park Press, and the subject is not a famous political activist or thinker.  The book is autobiographical, covering around fifteen years of the author’s early life, from around aged seven to his early twenties.  It is not a scholarly book, with footnotes and a bibliography, but a novelistic account of growing up and leaving home, a sensitively told tale of running away from school and parents, and the search for values and ideals that would provide a meaningful structure to his life.  The author is a good friend of mine and for that reason, of course, I am predisposed to find his book interesting, but then Jeremy had an eventful early life, a curious blend of sadness and hope, and he narrates it well.

Reading about the life of someone you know quite well, who is similar in age, background, and experience, but in other ways is quite different, provides an interesting contrast from reading about the life of someone who is famous for their actions or ideas, but who lived at a different time and in very different circumstances.   The closeness of circumstance creates an immediacy that allows me to imagine what Jeremy’s life experience might have felt like, for it is easy for me to suppose that I was there alongside him.  The details of life, that bring texture to the narrative – the car his mother drove, the music he listened to, the books he read, the clothes he wore – are all very familiar to me: I too read that book, liked that song, went to similar pubs.  Although I studied at Cambridge, it was a very different place from when Frank Ramsey was there, sixty or more years earlier; and although I have visited some of the places where Lydia Maria Child lived and worked, it was a century and a half after she had been there.  Reading Jeremy’s book was enjoyable precisely because of its familiarity, the fact that his narrative arc runs adjacent to mine.    

Three very different lives, but each of great interest: the inspirational activist, who helped to change the United States for the better, the brilliant intellectual range of a young British scholar, and the struggle of a young man to find an authentic set of values by which to live.  None of these books hold up their subjects as role models: few of us have the courage and resourcefulness of Lydia Maria Child, almost none of us the speed and depth of thought of Frank Ramsey, and Jeremy’s family’s travails remind us of Tolstoy’s observation, that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  As I have learned, biographies do not need to offer us exemplars to be valuable and enjoyable, they simply need to tell us interesting things about other lives, allowing us to reflect on the unique narrative arc that we are responsible for. 

There have been some authors who claim that the ordinariness of our lives makes them uninteresting to others.  Fernando Pessoa writes: I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history.  These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.  What is there to confess that’s worthwhile or useful.  What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it’s no novelty, and if only to us, then it won’t be understood.   And yet, despite this, Pessoa wrote, leaving for posterity, on scraps of paper stored in a suitcase, hundreds of pages of his thought and reflections, which continue to provoke, entertain, and perplex the reader, a century after he wrote them.  Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is a testimony to this paradox, that even a so-called lifeless history can be illuminating.  To read the story of another life can be helpful to better live one’s own life.